


All in the Plan

by Kaile (rcs)



Category: Ragnarok Online
Genre: F/M, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2011-04-07
Updated: 2011-04-07
Packaged: 2017-10-17 17:23:28
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 833
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/179213
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rcs/pseuds/Kaile
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Casimir has it all worked out.</p>
            </blockquote>





	All in the Plan

He knows her better than anyone else in the guild ever would. Casimir knows this-- knows it like he knows how to breathe, like he knows his chord fingerings, like he knows her footsteps as she light-steps it down the hall, whatever little song she's got playing in her head sending slippered feet to a rhythm he doubts anyone-- at all-- could ever reproduce.

He knows the curve of her back as she leans back, back, back, the waterfall of chestnut hair she leaves untied falling to brush the ground; he knows every one of the myriad expressions that flicker across her face as she speaks. He's familiar with every laugh she's ever made, he's ever-vigilant for every tear that's ever stained her face. Knowing Miraelle has been something that's been the lynchpin of his still-short, tumultous life.

If he wanted to be romantic-- and when it comes to Mira, he usually does--, he'd also be truthful: that her heartbeat times the tempo of his songs, and the way she says his name some days-- like it's a secret, one she can't quite keep-- is the lead-in to the melody he wishes he could write. His teachers-- the Songmasters, the Lutemasters, pretty much every one of them-- have told all of their students, time after time, that the key to true success for every Bard, the thing that takes a ditty and creates a ballad like the ones they memorize every day-- is finding their Muse. Most bards spend their lives looking for one; a few of those might find it before they become too old to run their rounds, drifting from the home-base of Lutie to Payon and Prontera and Al De Baran. The majority of bards don't even manage-- and the ones that do, are usually too old for the rigors of travel when their Muse finally peeks into their songs.

He knows he's lucky, then, that his was born in the house next to his, and spent her childhood following him around, dancing to his childish tunes and laughing with him. That she survived the raid on Morroc that left their parents dead and them orphans-- his, rich merchants, hers, textile weavers--, and took his hand in the choking smoke, so dark and eye-stinging that they couldn't see one another and just _knew_... It's a miracle, a gift from the Gods, and he knows it as well as he knows anything.

Their months of training so far from one another, the months she spent in Comodo, were like torture for him (and in a rare show of anything but cheer, her too), and they'd take whatever Kafra coupons they could scrounge up and go home to where the guild had taken them in as often as they could, almost inseperable when they arrived. Long ago, Miru had asked upon their arrival-- Cas hardly eight, and Mira just past six-- if this was his little sister, and they'd both shaken their heads emphatically-- as if they both knew, even then, that as the years went on and they grew up that the eventual end of the true innocence of it all would be the day that Cas looked up from strumming his harp, seventeen years old, to see Mira with the mid-autumn light catching her hair as she spun, laughing and clapping as the bangles on her wrists and ankles sang their own song, and realized that _this_ was the reason he sang, to see her smile and try to pull him up to dance with her.

That she was his Muse, and that she was completely oblivious to it, was something he felt was both obvious and as it should be; they'd been all each other had for so long that it felt perfectly natural to progress to this point. But if she felt any of the rest of it for him, she wasn't very good at showing it-- she was sweet to everyone, and enthusiastic, and affectionate, but he didn't want to upset her if he was the only one who saw her that way.

So he doesn't say anything, though every day it grows harder and harder to see her repeatedly throw herself onto the rocky shores of badly-chosen love and wonder why she didn't turn away from the shores and come to him, and every night she wakes up with ill-defined nightmares and crawls into his bed it's harder and harder not to hold onto her and refuse to let go. It was like holding a honey-lemon in his mouth-- the sweetness and the tartness confused him, and eventually the tartness hurt, but there was always the honey, soothing the pain and reminding him why he did it in the first place. And in the meantime, there was always his music-- music never suffered when there was melancholy and pain there among the joy. He'd lose himself in it until she heard it, too; that was his plan. It would work out eventually.

He just knew it.


End file.
